DreamFleet Boeing 737-400

By Andrew Herd (28 December 2001)

he DreamFleet 737 must be one of the most eagerly awaited add-ons for Flight Simulator of all time, purely on the basis of the tens of thousands of visits which were made to the DreamFleet web site in the pre-launch stage. When the package was finally released, it did not disappoint, and there is no doubt that it is the best 737 aircraft and panel combination ever released for Flight Simulator. This review looks at the download version of the 737, with the final patch applied, but don't forget that there is also a CD-ROM version available.

The package is available from the Flight One Software web site, and the download is 45 Mb, a sizeable file, unless you have broadband access, although the site supports resumable downloads. You will also need the final patch, which is an additional 15 Mb.

This is a big package and the downloads don't end there; in addition to the main file, you will need the Quickstart manual, which is a 9 Mb zipped .pdf and it is also worth visiting the support page. Once you have downloaded the file, you will run the provided "ga737-1.exe", which will launch Flight One's E-Commerce software. Here you will provide the pertinent information, and upon purchase of the product, installation will take place. During this process, a "key" is deposited in a Flight One Software folder in your computer, and this key will allow you to re-install the 737 should you ever need to. Once you are up and running, you may also want to visit the DreamFleet technical support forum.

There is no doubt that you get a lot for your money with this package, although it isn't apparent at first sight and I should warn you that it takes a long while to get to know your way around this simulation.

A quick check of the "select aircraft" dialog after a new installation will only show one plane, in British Midland livery. Installing more planes involves a visit to the DreamFleet web site, where nearly 200 extra liveries are available for free. If you purchase the CD-ROM version, all the extra liveries are on it, which is a bonus. 31 of the add-on liveries are by DreamFleet themselves, the remainder being by independent painters, like my long-term favorite, the British Airways "Blue Poole" livery shown in the screen shots, which was created by Tormod Ihlen. Bearing in mind that when production of the 400 series ended in January 2000, a total of 486 hulls had been built, this is an absolutely astounding number of repaints and proof of just how popular this package is, should you need any, which brings me neatly to the Text-o-Matic utility.

Before Text-o-Matic, the moment a new panel was released for Flight Simulator, the developers were presented with the insoluble problem of supplying enough popular liveries to keep everyone happy. Some dealt with this by releasing a selection of liveries with the package at a fixed price, others settled for a single livery as standard, the users being expected to pay for any others they wanted. Neither solution works that well, with the consequence that the forums are alive with messages about the problems people have had matching their favorite panel to third-party aircraft models painted with the desired livery. One answer to this conundrum would be for suppliers to license their visual model for repaints, but in the current climate - where "pirate" repaints are a serious problem even for freeware aircraft designers - it would be commercial suicide.

Text-o-Matic is a brilliant solution to the livery conundrum, because it provides a template for repaints which is independent of the visual model, and so repainters can distribute new liveries as freely as they like without any risk of copyright infringement. The idea is so stunningly obvious that it is surprising that no-one has thought of it before. In my opinion, Text-o-Matic deserves some kind of award for the flightsim utility of the year, because I suspect that it, or something like it, will become an almost standard method of distribution for liveries of commercial aircraft.

Using Text-o-Matic is easy: you download a template (around a megabyte on average), decompress it into the appropriate folder, then run the utility, which wraps the textures around the visual model, adds night lighting, and then saves the new aircraft into Flight Simulator. In addition, Text-o-Matic can assign the correct callsign to the livery in FS2002, which is a neat trick. Freeware designers have taken to it like ducks to water, and I would hope that suppliers who currently charge for extra liveries will see the sense of adopting similar systems, because it offers the best of both worlds to both developers and users. The only criticism I have of the utility is that Windows XP users have to repeatedly click the "OK" button to build aircraft in FS2002, but at least you only have to add a livery once.

Moving on to the aircraft, the visual model is hard to fault, and there is a wealth of fine detail on the plane which puts many other commercial offerings to shame. The fuselage has 32 sides, the windows are transparent, with visible interiors, anything which can move, does, and the animation of the gear and the fans is excellent. The general proportions of the plane seem to be correct, particularly the slightly pear-shaped engine cowlings which characterise the 400 series, a detail on which many other designers have come unstuck. The wheels are firmly planted on the ground and the overall effect is extremely pleasing.

I did note three problems - the first being that if you fully extend or retract the flaps using F5 or F8 they don't move completely smoothly - but this appears to be the result of the developers running afoul of a bug. The second is that, in FS2000 spot plane view, the ailerons have a distracting habit of flipping up and down every so often, but so quickly that you have to be looking directly at them to spot it happening. This doesn't happen in FS2002.

Finally, this isn't a gMax aircraft model. Yeah, I know it is kind of hard to cope with this kind of bad news and maybe I should have broken it gently instead of just saying it straight out like that - but even though an entire six weeks went by in between the release of FS2002 and the DF737 patch hitting the streets, Terry Hill hasn't managed to convert the visual model to Microsoft's new standard! These designers, huh? I mean, how lazy can you get? To take my tongue out of my cheek, even if Terry had managed the miracle of converting the plane and getting it beta tested in the short time he had available, the advantages would have been pretty slight.

One advantage of sticking with the "old" FS2000 compatible visual model is that I doubt many users would willingly lose Text-o-Matic livery compatibility in exchange for such minor eye-candy as the ability to see the landing lights from the cockpit. Another is that allowing for the fact that the only gMax models on the block are the default planes and given the complexity of the new modelling tool, I reckon that developers are better off taking time to learn how to use it, rather than rushing potentially buggy designs to market, since the majority of users will neither know nor care whether a visual model is made in gMax or FSDS.

I downloaded half a dozen templates to test Text-o-Matic and the standard was pleasingly high. The developer's own templates are excellent, but they are rivalled by the "amateur" templates which are continually being uploaded, and the freedom Text-o-Matic offers means that this plane is likely to become a favorite with the VAs, as it is so easy to distribute new liveries. The one problem with having so many free liveries to chose from is that it is tempting to download twenty or thirty, but I have managed to resist this so far. My resolution may not last, though Blue Poole wins my award for the most eye catching livery I have seen in recent years and Tormod has my admiration for designing it. When DreamFleet do move over to gMax, Blue Poole had better get converted or I am staying with the FSDS aircraft (-:

The flight model was developed by the talented Steve Small, and it is one of the best he has ever done, in my opinion. Admittedly, I haven't ever actually come across a bad .air file from Steve, but this one transcends the limitations of Flight Simulator and the result is a plane that truly has the feel of a real aircraft. The handling has a very deliberate air to it, and the inertia of the 737 is well captured - you won't be doing any 90 degree turns on the threshold in this baby - but neither is it so heavy that it flies like the bigger Boeings, which is about as much as one can expect in Flight Simulator.

The panel is such a huge advance on the Microsoft effort that you are highly unlikely ever to want to use the default version ever again. The 737-400 depicted has one of the early glass cockpits, and the panel is a pleasing, but very functional, mix of the old and the new. The bitmaps themselves are excellent, probably better than anything I have ever seen before, with the added attraction that the aircraft DreamFleet used to take the shots is clearly a real work-horse, so the cockpit has a marvellously lived-in appearance that sets it apart from the vast majority of Flight Simulator panels - which tend to show planes in the state they left the factory. This 734 panel takes the opposite approach and it recreates the look of every airliner cockpit I have ever sat in, with bits of trim missing and scuff marks and dings in the paintwork testifying to the hard life such planes lead. Jets do not make money if they aren't in the air, and flying time takes its toll. It would be good to see more panels done this way, because the "lived-in" look is how a plane gathers its own personality. The screen shot shows the main panel with the gear sub-panel popped up for take-off.

The vast majority of the functionality of a real 737 is duplicated, but with some notable omissions, like the IRUs made so famous by the PIC 767. DreamFleet haven't ruled out making the IRUs available as a future add-on, but their philosophy has been to develop a panel which is spiritually true to the original and fun for mainstream users to play with, rather than to exactly duplicate every single function of the real plane. Given that this isn't meant to be a procedural simulator, the result is a panel that you can light up and fly straight out the box without having to memorise 300 pages of documentation first, although there is plenty to read as it is and users would be wise to take a look at the "Quick Start" manual, which covers almost everything you need to know in an 80 page .pdf (available as a separate download). Virtually every knob and switch you see moves, and the vast majority control sub-systems, but the system integration isn't so tight that forgetting to hit one crucial switch or another could ruin your day and the result is a sim that makes a really good introduction to airline flight.

Part of the key to using the cockpit is understanding the View Control panel. This little gem is hidden behind the yoke at bottom left of the main panel and it can be toggled on and off by clicking on the selcal plate. I keep it in view more or less all the time, because it allows one click access to all the subsidiary panels, and makes it possible to use the cockpit without spending the entire time pulling down Flight Simulator's own menus.

Apart from the main panel, you will become most familiar with the radio console and the overhead panel. For some bizarre reason, in FS2002 the overhead panel will not cover certain other panels, such as the gear console, if they are popped up at the same time, but although this is annoying, it doesn't take long to get used to it. The console is very realistic, right down to the "no cups" warning (but where on earth would you find space to put a cup on it?) and in addition to the dual comm radios, nav, ADF radios and transponder, it controls the EADI and EHSI modes and the panel lighting. The radios work just as they do in steam 737s, with no switchable frequencies, though you do get the option to listen to the morse, if you find life is too quiet. A series of hot-spots on the EHSI mean that you can switch modes and range by clicking directly on the panel, which limits the number of times you will need to access the console.

The Flight Management Computer (FMC) was developed by Tom Main, of Flight One software and uniquely, it can be run independently of the aircraft. This seems to make no sense at all, until you realise that one unique feature of this FMC is that you can fire it up without Flight Simulator running, and play around with a flight plan. I'll confess that after I realised it was possible to do this, I became completely addicted to it, especially given that the FMC will import FS2000 flight plans directly. Thanks to Tom, I now have flight plans worked out for places I will never go, even in Flight Simulator.

The screen shot shows the FMC being run slaved to Flight Simulator, but if you have a twin screen setup, it is possible to move the FMC onto the second screen and clear the forward view, and the same can be done with all the other subsidiary panels provided you undock them first (you can use up to four monitors for this, but it might be cheaper to buy a real 737). For the rest of us, there is a hot-spot on the lower panel which clears the FMC from view. If you have used FMCs in simulations before, this one shouldn't present too many difficulties, but judging from the forums, many users have fallen into the trap of assuming that all FMCs work the same way, and this one does not. Effectively, there are three baselines for FMCs: the B747/757/767; "European" FMCs, as used in the Airbus; and the Smith's Industry instrument shown here. While the three have some things in common, they differ just enough to make them interesting.

Fortunately, the FMC comes with a page-sensitive help file, which is accessible with a right mouse click, and there is also a tutorial and a printed help file, which should help users find their way around this complex instrument. The lack of IRUs in the simulation greatly simplifies pre-flighting the FMC, and Tom has added two features which make things even easier. The first is a series of prompts which lead the user from screen to screen until the job is done, the second is an even more unrealistic, but extremely useful ability to left-click LSK1 on the PERF INIT page and automatically load the aircraft weight data - which, incidentally can be modified by using the Load Manager utility supplied with the package. No doubt thousands of users will be grateful to Tom for sparing them having to get a calculator out every time they preflight the magic box.

The FMC is about as fully implemented as mainstream users would wish, right down to the fix page, which is a great piece of coding, though it will be of pretty academic interest to most simmers. Equally, the hold page could do with some enhancement, but since I loathe and detest even flying an orbit in real life, the prospect of wanting to simulate a hold when you don't actually need to is beyond my understanding. Like the FMCs in the PSS planes, which have improved with each update and new version, the best way to look at this particular piece of code is as a "work in progress", and while it works well as it stands, I hope will see it go through a cycle of enhancement.

The most noteworthy thing about this part of the 737 package is that it is the first working FMC available in an FS2002 plane, which is no mean achievement. The code is very reliable after the patch and the bug which could crash the FMC if Flight Simulator was paused for a long time seems to have gone, as has its irritating inability to deal with DISCOs, I am pleased to say. An additional feature post-patch is the ability to enter speed restrictions on the legs page, which was much missed in the original implementation. As I said earlier, anyone who understands the general principles of FMC operation shouldn't have any problems with using it, and when I deliberately tested the code for stability by repeatedly loading and deleting STARs, it passed with flying colors.

In its original incarnation, the FMC lacked any SIDs or STARs, which is half the reason for using one of these things, but now it incorporates a database from Prabal Gosh. I didn't check every single one of the STARs, but I found one or two peculiarities among them where waypoints were clearly wrong, for example the BNN arrivals to EGLL, but no doubt this will be fixed with time. But the best thing about these procedures is that there is a unique viewer for them built in to the FMC, which lets you preview procedures for a particular runway, so that you can easily work out which is the best one to use. Without a utility like this, choosing a STAR involves a long hunt through sets of approach charts to make sure that the aircraft isn't going to have to fly all around the houses to transition off the current airway - if you haven't used an FMC before I can't over-emphasise just how useful the viewer is.

If you are familiar with the original version of the 737, the patch brings quite a few changes with it, notably the Traffic alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). While this new feature doesn't work in FS2000, which doesn't have any AI traffic, it displays nearby aircraft on the EHSI on the FS2002 map mode lower ranges. While there aren't any aural warnings, it emulates enough of the functions of a real TCAS to make it fun to use and I confess I spent a good deal of my testing flights chasing the AI aircraft just for the pleasure of watching the thing go off.

There are a host of other little fixes, like the way the throttles automatically retard to idle at 27 feet above ground level during an autopilot approach; the addition of smoke generation (just like the real thing, if you have an older, less than optimally maintained 734); a tweak to the GPWS to allow S-Combo fans to use that program without problems when running the 737; and modifications to the MCP to allow speed mode selection independent of autopilot engagement.

There is no virtual cockpit, but the default 737 cockpit is dreadful and until such time as I see a VC that is good enough to use I can't say this causes me any grief at all. These are very early days for FS2002 commercial addons and like gMax it wouldn't surprise me if developers took their time feeling their way into the this new environment. Quite a few questions about VC functionality remain to be answered and I guess it is only after all the relevant software development kits have been out for a while that we are going to be in a position to see this feature of FS2002 being used to the maximum.

Criticisms? I guess I have to deal with the fact that the FMC doesn't duplicate absolutely every single last mode of the real thing, although this is a conscious decision which the developers have made very public. To the complete mystification of many simmers, arguments about what the "experts" expect of a flight sim FMC have raged back and forth ever since the first partial implementation of an FMC was released in the PSS 777 panel. Just to put some kind of perspective on this increasingly tedious dispute, I would warn against judging this, the PSS planes and any other releases we may see at this price point against the PIC team's 767, which has the most fully implemented FMC ever seen in Flight Simulator - and I have a couple of reasons for doing so. The first is that the 767 package has about a decade of coding years bound up in it and it is a very special case; I doubt if it will be cost-effective to develop another simulation with a similar level of avionics sub-system detail ever again.

The second is that since most of us still start the default 182 with the keyboard shortcut, I guess it won't surprise you to learn that many people never graduate beyond using the Microsoft autopilot even when they buy sims like this one. Your feedback means that developers are beginning to understand that FMCs are only used to their limits by a few power users and that precious resources are better spent on areas which mainstream simmers appreciate. I am coming around to the same opinion, my early enthusiasm for full featured FMCs having been muted by email which makes it clear that the majority of flight simmers just aren't that interested in technical wizardry that can't be comprehended without hours of bookwork.

It goes against the grain to write this, but a recurrent theme in my email is complaints that addons are too complex and that users value visual and flight models way above the intricacies of avionics, a collective wish which goes a long way towards explaining sales trends in Flight Simulator packages. Inevitably, there are a few at the more obsessional end of the user base who feel that an addon isn't complete unless the toilet flush has the same note as the original and if I have fallen into this trap myself in the past all I can do is apologise and say that I enjoyed being led astray by some wonderful software. But when I put it to a a commercial pilot of my acquaintance that a $30 simulator might duplicate all the functions of an actual 737 FMC, all he did was laugh and reply that it has taken Smith's a decade of work to get the real thing programmed and you still have to be careful what you do with it. You get the picture.

There have been some issues with this sim where the FMC vertical navigation function is concerned, which seem to hit some users and not others. I spent ages trying to work out why this should be, until I realised that the common factor was that users installing the 737 into "virgin" FS2002 setups weren't having the problem while more experienced simmers (for example, other reviewers) were. Then I read of the troubles another developer was having and removed Pete Downson's excellent FSUIPC utility from my modules directory - following which the 737 VNAV began to behave itself again. As far as I can see, the VNAV issue is likely to be a problem with FSUIPC builds after version 2.78 and it may be connected with what FSUIPC does to the weather, but I am still working on it.

In a way it is surprising that no one has done a 737 of this quality before. While everyone likes to fly the big ones from time to time, a 747 flight, even in Flight Simulator, takes more organisation and time than many of us have to spare. Sure, one day I plan to simulate a flight from London to Hong Kong, but I'm going to have to put a whole weekend aside to do it, and I can't help thinking that there are other, more interesting things to do with my life. So for now, short-haul flights are where it is mostly at, and what better aircraft is there to use for them than the FlightOne 737? Nice one, DreamFleet.

In a way it is surprising that no-one has done a 737 of this quality before. While everyone likes to fly the big ones from time to time, a 747 flight, even in Flight Simulator, takes more organisation and time than many of us have to spare. Sure, one day I plan to simulate a flight from London to Hong Kong, but I'm going to have to put a whole weekend aside to do it, and I can't help thinking that there are other, more interesting things to do with my life. So for now, short-haul flights are where it is mostly at, and what better aircraft is there to use for them than the FlightOne 737? Nice one, DreamFleet.